How do guys know which clothes to buy and how to wear them? Do you just buy what's in the department stores? Is there a magazine that's full of clues, but not too fey or mannered? You can always wear some nice slacks with a nice button-down shirt, I get that, but maybe a guy wants to wear an undershirt because it's cold, or can't decide whether to tuck something in or not, etc. My interest in this is mainly academic, so I'm not asking "what should I do/wear," but "where do you look to get a sense of the done thing?"

Last week's CBS News Sunday Morning had a really good segment on African-Americans in the military that you can watch online. It talked about how in the years since the military integrated blacks have made up 13% of the US population but 25% of the military ranks because they saw it as a good way to establish a career where they would make money and be respected but that enlistment by African-Americans is down by more than half now because "'influencers' in the black community -- parents, teachers, clergy -- feel in general that Bush administration policies have hurt African-Americans. And more than any other group, they oppose the war in Iraq."

Even the black veterans they interviewed were discouraging kids from enlisting. In one of their words: "The war is very unpopular, and it's going to get worse...As long as it's a volunteer army, I'd tell 'em not to volunteer."

The takeaway seems to be "George Bush doesn't care about black people? Then we're not going to fight his damn war."

There are a couple of economists out there trying out a new weight loss strategy wherein you, the fatty, enter into a legally-enforceable contract that puts a certain amount of money in escrow. If you make your weight loss goal, you get your money back. If you fail, it goes to a charity.

Programs like that already exist. My old roommate did one. From what I've seen, I think they cause people to lose less weight - I know she (and the other people in the program) picked easier goals than they would have if there was no financial penalty (rationality at work!). I think her goal was only something like 6 lbs. over 12 weeks when she'd always had a goal of losing 1-2 lbs. a week when she'd done other diet programs. And, sure enough, she lost about 6 lbs.

I would wager that many people who have a more ambitious goal and fail to meet it by a small margin probably lose more weight than those who have a more modest goal and succeed. But if there's money at stake, people are less willing to set the bar that high.

Oh boy! Tracklist below. Although this was created with no particular overarching concept in mind (which really makes things more difficult) it was motivated by the thought of a mix with a pair of tracks, Eric Dolphy's "Something Sweet, Something Tender", which made it in, and Spaceways, Inc.'s "Back of a Cab", which didn't, so I link to it here, you see.

As you can see below, it's a pretty backwards-looking mix. Also oggs and mp3s are freely intermingled; use vlc or something if you're on a mac. Or you could get xmms from fink, or audacious using gtk-quartz if you're really slick. I think there's an ogg plugin for itunes, actually, anyway.

No, anti-Zionism is not in principle anti-Semitism but it is time for thoughtful minds--especially on the left--to be disturbed by how much anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism share, how much the dominant species of anti-Zionism encourages anti-Semitism.

And so:

If you judge a Jewish state by standards that you apply to no one else. . .

if there is nothing Hamas can do that you won't blame 'in the final analysis' on Israelis;

if your sneer at the Zionists doesn't sound a whole lot different from American neoconservative sneers at leftists;

then you should not be surprised if you are criticized, fiercely so, by people who are serious about a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians and who won't let you get away with a self-exonerating formula--"I am anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic"--to prevent scrutiny. If you are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, then don't use the categories, allusions, and smug hiss that are all too familiar to any student of prejudice.

It is time for the left that learns, that grows, that reflects, that has historical not rhetorical perspective, and that wants a future based on its own best values to say loudly to the left that never learns: You hijacked "left" in the last century, but you won't get away with it again whatever guise you don.

There are three antecedents here. I suspect that the number of people meeting these conditions is small, and that the people meeting them are on the fringe. (I admit the third is puzzling me, since I'm not sure what's distinctive about neocon sneers at leftists. But the point remains.) Maybe this is false; or maybe Cohen lives somewhere very different.

Previously...pot growers could produce a pound of potent "B.C. bud" for about $2,000 Canadian and, with the exchange rate, smugglers buying with U.S. currency could sell it for a hefty profit south of the border. In those days, an American dollar in Canada was like a 50 percent discount card, and there's nothing like a wholesale discount to bolster retail profits.

Production costs remain in the range of $2,000 Canadian, Easton said. But with the currencies at par, the profit margin is completely gone, unless Montanans are willing to pay 50 percent more for the prime northern bud. A smuggler's risks and transport costs are no longer offset by profit.

...

These days...hardly any Canadian-grown marijuana crosses the border, because it just doesn't pay.

Rather, that if you doubt there being such a thing as natural talent, this video of a six-year-old swimming should set you straight. There's a lot of inspirational "if you just set your mind to it" talk, and of course you can succeed with hard work (just as you can fail with talent), but in any given activity, some people will be, through nothing but chance, much better at it than everyone else.

I'm really frustrated today. Not only can I not think of something to blog about, I know I had a good idea for a blog post last night. I scribbled down a reminder to myself about what it was so that I could write about it today but now I can't decypher what that reminder was supposed to remind me of.

I'm sure whatever "write sticky note post" was would have been brilliant, y'all.

I associate the word "I'ma," meaning "I'm going to," with black urban slang, and that's because I've only heard it used on The Wire, so imagine my surprise and satisfaction when I was listening to Doc Boggs' wonderful "Country Blues" yesterday and he sang "Honey, I'ma come to go your bail." That's 1920s whitey talk. But the transcription here makes it out as "I'm a-coming." I think that's wrong (mp3 of the song) but I wonder if "I'ma" does have its roots in expressions like "I'm a-coming." And what is a-coming, anyway? Apo?

"Country Blues," by the way, is a great, great song, with some of the best lines in all of popmusicdom, and Boggs singing is perfectly strained and creepy. Plus, the banjo.

The Coach is comically averse to doling out praise. The best you can hope for is a "that's a little better." But the best example last night was when he started a sentence about my breaststroke with "The stroke itself is" and it was clear from the context that the natural next word was "fine" or even, god forbid, "good," but he caught himself, backed all the way up, and said "Of the two strokes, freestyle and breaststroke, your breaststroke is the better stroke."

I told this to one of the lifeguard/coaches at my regular pool, thinking maybe I'd get a little sympathy. Instead, he told a story about one of his water polo players who was "terrible" when he started, worked his ass off, joined a club team and did extra practices and came back months later to ask "What do you think, coach?" To which the response was "Now you're average."

So, I've got a question for the married/long-term-involved commenters, particularly those who, like me, are either slightly too old or way too old to be part of the Facebook/Myspace/Twitter/Whatever generation where everyone's used to conducting their social life online. What does your spouse know about Unfogged, and how much of an effort of it was to convey it?

I was thinking about this in connection with UnfoggeDCon II, which I'm dragging Buck to, partially because it should be a fun party and partially because given that he's never going to put the time in to reading enough of the site to get to know people, having him meet a bunch of the people around here will make talking about you guys easier. It's hard to intelligibly chat about a bunch of people with silly nicknames who I largely don't know for real; on the other hand, the things that get said here are often the most interesting part of my day.

I found 'disclosing' Unfogged to Buck a real effort, which may be just more evidence of my neuroses, but I'm wondering if it's a general issue. He's an online kind of guy, but not in the current fashion -- he was a newsletter editor/publisher back before the Web, when he was stuffing newsletters into envelopes, and he does the same thing now on a website. Email and IM are for RL friends or professional contacts, or Letters to the Editor, but he doesn't mostly think of the internet as a locus for personal relationships with people who you wouldn't have known absent the online connection. He pushes content online, it's not a two-way thing. Another way of putting it is that for Buck, the thing on his desk is a box full of text; for me, while there's lots of text in there too, it's a box full of people.

So, he knew I read political blogs, but clearly had it in his head that it was basically equivalent to reading magazines. And when I started blogging here, he was thinking of it as kind of similar to getting hired by a small-circulation non-paying publication: again, pushing content rather than engaging in a back-and-forth. And that's a lousy description of Unfogged, if not of some other blogs: this is about interacting with people, and there are a whole lot of people here I feel a lot of affection for.

I found myself feeling very weird about it, not long after I started as a front-page poster. The existence of 'a whole big part of my social life, populated by people I care about and some of whom I kid around with flirtily' is something that I'd expect to be fully disclosed to a spouse, but Unfogged is sort of self-concealing. I post and comment mostly from work, and talking about what goes on online is difficult to someone who hasn't been reading along. And I hit this point where I found myself thinking that while I hadn't been hiding anything on purpose, I could totally see Buck for once reading a thread, and getting somewhat exercised about what the hell was going on: "I thought you were a small-scale pundit, and instead you're joking about sex with a bunch of internet stalkers?!??!!!"

I ended up putting a lot of somewhat awkward effort into insisting that he read the site some, so as not to be in the position of explaining anything that looked untoward after the fact. Am I the only one out there who felt that this had the potential for being a real marital issue, or has anyone else had similar qualms (or, which would be awful if it had happened, actual relationship problems caused by a spouse's discovery of an Unfogged habit)?

My mother and I were talking about debates over the weekend. She, god bless her, has watched every single one so far. I've watched none. She was outraged and I said I didn't see the point considering that I knew who I was voting for and didn't see that changing and, more importantly, undecided voters aren't watching the debates yet. I only feel the need to watch the debates if people around me who still haven't made up their mind might be talking about them so that I can engage them in conversation about what they saw and try to persuade them. She insisted they are very important and that the media was not reporting on things candidates said that needed to be heard more widely. I said I agreed but, if the media wasn't reporting on it, it didn't really matter. If a tree falls in the woods and an undecided voter doesn't hear it, does it make a sound?

A recent study at the University of Glasgow found that alcohol makes the opposite sex appear more facially attractive, at least in the eyes of the drinker. Compared to abstainers, drinkers were more likely to rate someone of the opposite sex as attractive. Alcohol had no effect on the rating of same-sex attractiveness. This may explain why drinking in bars and at parties often leads to sex.

Seems obvious enough, but Yglesias says,

I actually think it's an interesting finding. My hypothesis would have been that the causal mechanism was almost entirely a case of lowered standards and that something like "he looked better last night" was a pure ex post facto rationalization for past bad decision-making.

Has Yglesias ever been drunk? Has he not noticed how people of the opposite sex look so delicious when you're drunk? The drunk party thought isn't "she'll do," but "omygawwwd, yrrr soooo byootfllll."

Dammit! This has been such a frustrating weekend. Every time I think I've crossed something off my To Do list, I realize there's something wrong and I have to put it back on. (Yay! I finally bought ___. Oops! It's the wrong one and I have to return it!)

And it keeps happening! Today, I shit you not, I finally got around to setting up that E-Trade account I opened in August. I was so proud of myself!

I was sympathizing with a lawyer friend yesterday because he'd gone in to work on a Sunday, when he said that could have left the work for Monday, but because there were a lot of deals going down now, he wanted to make sure he would have time for anything unexpected. It was a wonder that I even understood the words he was speaking, because a thought like that has never once so much as flitted through my head.

On a recent flight I finally read Amsterdam-- strange! Have we talked about this? Is the ending completely disappointing or am I missing some highminded take on things that would transform clumsy plotting into Fine Art?

From the Dept of People Who Will Be First Against The Wall When The Revolution Comes...

Which raises the question: who would you put first against the wall, come the revolution?

My answer: John Yoo. Sure, other people have committed more evil, but it really chaps my hide that Yoo 1) is an immigrant like me, but one who decided to undermine, rather than celebrate and strengthen, what's best about his adopted country 2) used his training in the life of the mind for nefarious ends; he makes the brain itself seem disreputable. I genuinely hate him.

Of course, as we learned from the execution of Saddam, killing one person alone can make even the worst seem sympathetic, so we'll have to throw a bunch of other lawyers against the wall with Yoo, but it shouldn't be hard to find a few who totally deserve it.

One minute I'm convinced I'm a philosophical fraud: I'm a total retard and my dossier is a piece of shit and I'm utterly unqualified for these jobs and I'm not going to get even a single interview. And then the next minute I look at the addresses on the envelopes and freak out because I don't even want most of these jobs: I don't want to live in Assfuck, Nowhere and I don't want to teach a 5-5 to hordes of mouth-breathing douchebags whose deepest philosophical conviction is that thinking deep thoughts probably makes you a faggot.

One consoling thought is that there are many places that (a) sound scary and unpleasant, especially to coastal and big-city snobs, and (b) are actually really nice places to live. I gave a talk recently in a mid-sized midwestern city that turned out to have cheap real estate-- junior faculty in nice houses-- and a variety of fun and interesting places to eat and drink. Sure, many people there believe that thinking deep thoughts makes you a faggot, but then again it does.

If a German post can get 150 comments, a swimming post should get at least ten. New swimming social networking site Floswimming (via) has several cool videos up, among them one of the Wisconsin men's swim team at a "power building" practice (good stuff begins around 2 minutes in). About 10% of me thinks "Man, it would be great to be on a team and get in shape like that." The other 90% of me remembers how creaky I am and how soft my couch is.

In other swimming videos, we have European freestyle sprint champion Stefan Nystrand first swimming slowly, and sprinting. Does he snap his hips? Of course not. Some hip rolling when he swims slowly, almost none at all when he sprints.

But the few times I've included any Latin in my posts people have jumped all over me in their haste to find me at fault. So I point at this and present you with something in a different non-English language, to wit:

I guess there was some Latin in there after all! Problem solved. (In this regard one may find the second introduction to the third critique, Funes the Memorious, and several passages in (for example) The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil of interest.)

Turns out that the "black people vs. niggers" bit that I think made Chris Rock a star is on YouTube. A lot of you have seen it, I'm sure; I get the impression that it's something of a pop-cultural touchstone by now. And it seems like the perfect example of something one wants to disavow because it will be put to unsavory uses and not necessarily because it's bad or false on its face, or, to put it another way, of something that's fine when the audience is a particular set of people, but not when it's a different set. But his mostly black audience in this clip loves it, and damn, it is funny.

This link, sent to me by I Don't Pay, describes the game Humiliation, where people confess to Great Books that they haven't read. As the link says "You get credit for being shameless."

I'd open this up to other media, like movies and music, and pre-emptively say that I'll roll my eyes at anyone who, as in the example, thinks that having not read Proust counts. Only things that are actually embarrassing, people.